Chapter 8
When the unexpected request came, Giles was taken aback, his eyes darting between the piano and Lily. The last time he had touched a piano was before his voice had even begun to break. He doubted whether he could play at all.
And yet, he couldn’t bring himself to flatly refuse. In the end, he sat down at the piano. The pieces he had learned as a child had long since vanished from his memory, but he could at least stumble through a simple sonatina exercise.
At last, his fingers pressed the keys. A slow melody trickled out. The Nuremberg Sonatina was, after all, a simple practice piece written for children learning the piano.
The practice piece of his youth. As he traced each note etched into the score, it felt like retracing the years of his childhood — years he had destroyed with his own hands.
Giles was no longer sitting in the empty room of an abandoned house. Instead, he heard, like an echo, the cheerful murmur of people conversing all around him.
I can’t do this. He was just about to lift his hands from the keys when someone sat beside him. Lily. She reached out her right hand and pressed a key. Her melody guided Giles like a tutor. Following her lead, he resumed playing.
As they played together, he found himself back in that familiar mansion of his happy days. He turned his head — beside him was a radiant young woman with flowing black hair.
If only he could turn away from everything, forget it all, and go back to those innocent times. His chest burned. And yet, at the same time, it warmed. The delicate thread of melody was leading him forward. Unable to resist its pull, Giles slowly leaned toward Lily.
The moment their lips touched, the melody that had conjured the illusion disappeared. Silence swallowed the air. In the stark boundary between fantasy and reality, Giles snapped back to himself.
“Ah, forgive me.”
He pulled away in a hurry, awkwardly adjusting his tie. What had he done? He had kissed her without permission. That had never been his intent. If she misunderstood, he would have no defense.
“I mean, I—”
But before he could finish, Lily closed the distance again. This time, it was she who kissed him. Clumsy, but full of passion.
Giles couldn’t resist. Lily came from a world far removed from his own. None of the past that was gnawing him apart from within had anything to do with her.
When Lily was near, when he heard her music, all of that seemed like it belonged to another universe — something he could forget.
Eloise Bismarck… no, Lily Belmore was his refuge. Giles let himself sink into the sweet moment that had arrived like a paradise. The pianist he had saved. The “right choice” he had made…
When he was with Lily, everything was all right.
It felt as though everything could become all right again.
He wrapped his arms around her, desperately, as though to shield her from the cold grip of reality that might steal her away.
“Lily…”
Her name left his lips in a trembling voice. Giles was nothing more than a broken-down hulk, stalled and powerless. But in this instant, the furnace within his chest burned brightly again.
Harrington had once said that Giles desired nothing, wanted nothing, that he had no goals, no longings at all. But now Giles understood.
Lily was more than just someone he wanted to protect.
He needed her.
He couldn’t let her go.
Lily Belmore was the one who set him in motion again.
That day, he found himself strangely reluctant to leave the mansion.
At first, he had only come to check on Lily’s safety before leaving again. But gradually, he began staying longer and longer. Perhaps it was because this vast, empty ruin had become more comfortable to him than the shabby apartment he lived in.
In the stripped-bare mansion — where the revolutionaries had confiscated everything, not leaving so much as a pen behind — the most comfortable place was the instrument storage room, where Lily often lingered. Oddly enough, the broken instruments that the revolutionaries had abandoned as useless gave a sense of comfort that even Giles had to admit.
Lily had her own way of passing time alone in this place. She peeled up a corner of the floorboards and pulled out a bundle of newspapers.
It turned out to be clippings of crossword puzzles — the kind that came as supplements in newspapers. She explained that she used to secretly snatch up discarded family papers, cut out the puzzles, and solve them to kill time.
She handed Giles the bundle, many of the puzzles still half-empty.
“There’s nothing else to do, so solve these for me. I can never manage them myself.”
“And what’s the point if I solve them all?”
“It feels good, doesn’t it?”
Giles accepted the crosswords and began filling in the blanks Lily had left. She sat beside him, watching as he wrote in the answers one by one.
Each crossword puzzle, of course, came with little hints like footnotes. A fish belonging to the family Pomacentridae. With alternating red or orange and white stripes, it is also called a clownfish. That would be anemonefish. He wrote the answer. His neat cursive clashed oddly with Lily’s handwriting.
To solve them, he had to pay careful attention to the hints and the letters Lily had already filled in. A stone placed at the base of a column, or figuratively, the foundation of something. On television, the image corresponding to the sound.
One clue froze him in place:
The feeling of cherishing someone or something dearly, or such an act.
What was it again? Giles felt his mind seize up, like a child caught doing something wrong. Another line urged him on: Between a man and a woman, the feeling of longing or affection, or such an act.
Of course, he knew the answer. How could he not? He had felt it wash over him like a tide only recently.
Yet he couldn’t bring himself to write it. Awkwardly, he stole a glance at Lily.
She had dozed off, her head resting on his shoulder, her eyes closed in weariness. The large army coat draped over her must have been warm, enough to lull her into sleep.
Giles reached out toward her. Having someone like this asleep at his side felt unreal.
This was the man who had shoved screaming, weeping countrymen into trucks, who had personally carried out executions.
Arresting people, killing them — that had been his daily life. Murder sanctioned by the new government had become his existence.
And now, here he was, solving crosswords at the side of a pianist who had improbably survived. This mundane scene, ordinary to others, felt impossibly unreal to him. It was as if he had awoken from a long nightmare.
His hand, hovering near her, withdrew. Touching her felt like it would shatter the dream.
He looked back down at the puzzle. A feeling everyone experiences at least once in life. The deepest, most powerful, and primal emotion… The name of an emotion he had believed would never again touch his life.
He wrote the word: Love.
The moment he inscribed it with his own hand, the vague emotion circling in his mind crystallized. Giles cherished Lily. He wanted to protect her at any cost. He loved her. There was no denying it. That was the truth.
But did Lily love him? He couldn’t be certain. Yet, she was there beside him, asleep under his coat. That fact alone was enough to console him.
Why had she left that space blank?
His thoughts turned to the testimonies he had taken from the Bismarck family. Perhaps Lily had buried away such tender emotions, finding no room for them in the fight to survive. Feelings that offered no use in survival — perhaps she had hidden them under the floorboards, never to be thought of again.
If Lily was his solace, perhaps he too could be hers. The thought gave him peace.
He closed his eyes, listening to her quiet breathing. In this moment of focus on her alone, the thoughts that had once pressed down on him like they would burst his skull finally fell silent.
He would enjoy this peace until he could feel whole again.
“What is it that’s been occupying your thoughts these days?”
Giles looked up at the man sitting across the table. Harrington stared at him as though he wished he could split open Giles’ head to see what lay inside.
Realizing he had been lost in thought, Giles straightened up.
“My apologies.”
“I didn’t mean it as a reproach. I just wondered if you were doing well.”
Seeming embarrassed by his own words, Harrington sighed.
“Given all that you’ve endured recently, it’s no surprise.”
“I’m fine.”
“Don’t bother lying to me. No matter that she was our enemy — before that, she was still your sister, wasn’t she? For the sake of the great revolution, you made a tremendous decision. I admire you for that.”
Giles bowed his head, murmuring his thanks. They were in a restaurant. Harrington had arranged this dinner, and Giles had no right to refuse. It seemed Harrington feared he might even attempt suicide — he rarely let Giles spend time alone.
“I thought this would be enough to secure your trust, but apparently there are more steps ahead. As you may have expected, some of the men who took part in that operation have submitted reports about you.”
